When you ask a novice what SEO is, the most common answer is that it’s all about ranking your site on the first page of Google. Such a vague idea makes people think that it is like buying candy from a store. However, SEO is not just about ranking your website, and you cannot buy rankings. The way it takes time to work hard in your school and universities to score good marks, SEO also requires hard work, knowledge, expertise, and, most importantly, patience to get the desired results. In this article, we will discuss what you get with SEO and what factors are important to getting SEO right.
Factors affecting the timeline of your SEO results
SEO is an ongoing process, and its timeline may take anywhere from three to six months and even more in certain cases. The timeline of results depends on many factors on your website. Here we have mentioned a list of a few factors affecting your SEO timeline:
1. Your SEO objectives
How long it takes to get SEO results depends on what you are expecting from your SEO strategy. Most marketers try to focus on the following goals and metrics in their SEO strategy:
- Increasing online visibility
- Gaining higher rankings in search results for specific keywords
- Increasing organic traffic from your site
It is important to use the right tools to make an effective strategy to get faster results. ESL Ranks Pro is a great tool to help you determine the right metrics to be considered for attaining your SEO goals. Its competitive research tool gives you a site overview to make it easy to understand visualized data about traffic, visibility, backlinks, and more SEO metrics.
2. Website’s age history
It usually takes longer to attain SEO results for a new website than for an established website. (more than a year old). An established website usually has built-up authority, rankings, and backlinks. An old site usually has higher chances of ranking than a new site when it has established authority and ranking. However, if the old site has been affected by manual actions like the Google penalty (manual action) or has other technical SEO errors, it may take more time to attain SEO results.
3. Competition
The competition in your industry or particular region also affects how slowly or swiftly you will be able to attain results. The more competition, the longer it will take to get the desired results. ESL Ranks Pro can help you determine the intensity of competition by understanding various metrics and making the right strategies to perform better than other industry players. For instance, a real estate dealer in a small community within a specific town would face less competition than a real estate dealer in a large city.
4. Website Structure and Design
Your website design and structure also affect how long it will take to optimize the website for search engines like Google. For instance, if a user finds it difficult to navigate between different landing pages of your site or there is a broken link that prevents the user from smoothly navigating the content, it will convey to search engines that your site is not user-friendly, and eventually it won’t rank on search engine result pages.
However, when you combine all the essential technical SEO elements with quality content, it will not take long for SEO to work for your website. It is also recommended to test the responsiveness of your site by conducting a mobile test. With millions of people using mobile devices for surfing the net, mobile friendliness has emerged as an important ranking factor that can help you rank higher on Google and other search engines.
5. Current SEO health
Your current SEO health will also affect how fast you will be able to see the first tangible results. In other words, the amount of work that has already been done on a website to improve its visibility will determine how much time and effort are required to reach the top search engine results pages. Some of the factors determining the current SEO health of a website are technical health, structure and user interface, published content, acquired backlinks, internal linking, and social media signals.
6. Your strategy
SEO is a powerful addition to your marketing mix, but its success will depend on how intelligently you implement it. It involves planning and carrying out actions involved in achieving those goals that help improve organic search ranking. However, your SEO strategy may fail in the following cases:
- You are using outdated SEO tactics.
- You are generating low-quality content.
- You are building poor-quality backlinks.
- Yoou are using keyword stuffing to gain higher rankings.
- Your website’s user experience is poor.
- You are not using the right tools for analytics and goal tracking.
7. Resources
Driving your website to the top requires a lot of hard work. You will need to fix all the technical errors, so you need a website developer to take care of the technical aspects of the website. An SEO professional has to work with a web developer team to implement an SXO (intersection of SEO and UX) strategy. It is important to understand that the search engine landscape has become much more competitive, and SEO results require the integrated efforts of a team. You need to have other professionals in your team, such as web designers and developers, social media marketers, and content developers, work collaboratively to get the desired outcomes. If you have enough resources for creating content, buying backlinks, and hiring SEO experts and web developers, there are greater chances of getting excellent results within the shortest span of time. If you don’t have enough resources, it will be very difficult to achieve your desired SEO results in a highly competitive niche.
8. SEO specialists’ expertise
Your SEO specialist will decide the strategy used to improve the ranking of your site. He or she will implement the strategies and changes needed based on his or her knowledge, experience, and values (ethical or black-hat SEO). The faster your SEO specialist implements ethical and impactful SEO tactics, the sooner you’ll see some tangible results.
It is important to choose the right person or company to take care of the SEO of your site. Your site represents your business, and anything not handled with care can make you lose ranking as well as reputation. SEO involves a lot of things, from facing technical errors to content creation to internal linking to building backlinks and more.
One important thing is to beware of SEO specialists making false promises of quick results using black-hat SEO tactics, as they are heavily penalized by Google, whether done consciously or otherwise. The key is to look for someone who is updated with the latest SEO knowledge, uses ethical methods and search engine guidelines, and knows the rules of the game to make your site rank higher ethically.
How do you speed up your SEO results?
There is no quick fix to increase your search engine ranking, and you need to patiently put in the effort for a certain period of time to get the desired results. However, if you have already implemented a fair SEO strategy and are looking for ways to speed up the process, here are some tips to improve your SEO rankings faster than normal. Keep in mind that some of these changes may take a longer time to show results than others.
1. Formulate an SEO strategy
Regardless of the ranking and size of your site, it is important to start by creating a strategy to drive organic traffic from search engines. It usually varies from one SEO professional to another, but the following are considered key components of an effective SEO strategy:
- A set of target keywords
- A content strategy
- A backlink acquisition strategy
- On-page optimization
2. Focus on low-difficulty keywords
Low-difficulty keywords are the ones that are easy to rank for. If you focus on low-difficulty keywords, you will be able to get results much faster. You can use the ESL Ranks Pro keyword research tool to find low difficulty keywords. The tool shows detailed keyword review including the SEO difficulty of each keyword. A low score means that the keyword has not be targeted by many competitors. Thus, you need focus on a keyword that is relevant and has low competition.
3. Optimized web pages in positions 4 to 10
If there are pages ranking between positions 4 and 10 on search engine result pages, optimize them using minor tweaks. You can track your Google ranking in ESL Rankings Pro, a comprehensive ranking tool.
- Focus on keywords with the lowest keyword difficulty scores and the highest search volumes.
- Make sure the target keyword is present in your page’s title tag, H1 tag, and opening paragraph.
- Make sure your content is accurate, updated, and optimized.
- Optimize images to increase page speed.
- Work on on-page SEO factors.
- In short, work on meta tags, headings, and content to make them more appealing to search engines.
- Some technical errors can make it really hard for a website to rank higher. For instance, if Google cannot crawl and index a page properly, it won’t be able to rank highly on search engine result pages.
4. Build a solid content strategy.
Content is an important aspect of any SEO strategy. If you want quicker results, it is important to remove unhelpful content from your site.
- Unhelpful content is poorly written, irrelevant, and fails to meet the user’s expectations. In order to identify unhelpful content, you can conduct a content audit and take the right action. If content performs poorly on key metrics, it is better to delete it.
- If there are multiple pages on your site covering the same topic, it will be better to create one helpful resource and redirect accordingly.
- Focus on creating high-quality and helpful content to generate significant traffic and conversions on a website. Google has also provided guidelines for creating helpful, reliable, and people-first content.
5. Build quality backlinks.
Acquiring backlinks from reliable and authoritative resources will help to improve the credibility of your site in the eyes of users as well as search engines.
6. Utilize social media platforms.
It is always good to promote your content on various platforms, including social media sites, to increase their visibility and drive traffic to your website. Social signals can indirectly impact the rankings of your site.
7. Improve the user experience.
When you have a good UX on your site, you’re more likely to boost your website’s ranking in the search results. UX allows you to keep leads engaged, which increases their dwell time on your page. Some of the important factors to be considered in improving the user experience are:
- Natural language processing
- Core web vitals
- Web page experience
- Creation of helpful content
- Pay attention to internal links.
Internal links are an essential aspect of an effective SEO strategy. It is important to always create internal links between relevant content on a website. It helps users better understand the topic as well as get the information they are seeking from your site. On top of that, it helps Google better understand your site standards, which will help them see your site as an authority in your industry.
8. Use the right SEO tools.
SEO tools play a key role in creating an effective SEO strategy. From pointing out technical issues hampering your site to ranking on search engines to finding the right keywords to target, these tools provide a suite of benefits. ESL Rankings Pro is one such comprehensive ranking tool that can aid your SEO efforts and help you formulate the right strategy to fine-tune your SEO efforts and get results more quickly.
As the digital marketing landscape is continuously evolving and Google and search engines are bringing significant changes to their algorithms, it is important to implement a well-planned and comprehensive SEO strategy that considers factors taken by Google algorithms for ranking websites on search engine result pages, such as keyword relevance, content quality, backlinks, and user experience.
Now the question is: How long will it take to see results with the right strategy? Here is what Google says about how long it takes to get results from your SEO.
SEO is an ongoing process, and in general, it can take anywhere from 3 to 12 months to start seeing results from SEO. However, in certain cases where your site is penalized or has technical errors, it may take longer to get it on the ranking track.
One should also keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process. You cannot do it just once and forever. Just like when you climb the ladder of success, you have to take further steps to maintain it. Because competitors—both current and newcomers—will constantly be gunning to take that position from you. In other words, it requires an ongoing effort to stay on top and reap maximum benefits from it.
How to improve your SEO results with RanksPro?
Are you looking for the right tool to develop a winning SEO strategy? Let’s make RanksPro simplify your SEO efforts. The right SEO strategy requires the use of the right tools to achieve the desired outcomes. RanksPro is a simple yet powerful rank-tracking tool for monitoring your site’s ranking, traffic, observing your competitors’ progress, and staying updated on keyword trends. It can help you with all important aspects of your SEO including keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, backlink analysis and rank tracking. By using RanksPro, you can avoid the guesswork and jump into SEO, which gives you lasting search results.
